CHAPTER I. COLONIAL LITERATURE. OLONIAL AMERICA is divided historically into two periods. The first beginning with the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, ends with the date of Bacon's Rebellion and King Philip's War, in 1676. In those seventy years a section of the English people snatched from country towns and busy cities made new dwellings in a primitive and dangerous wilderness, where they were home-sick and yearning to keep in touch with absent friends; or, as in the case of the Puritans, in love with their freedom, perilous as it was, and anxious to coax and win others to try the dangers of the deep and of their environment, for sweet Liberty's sake. Naturally enough, their records were, at first, in the form of letters, the daily happenings, work, perils of the colonists, with accounts of strange fauna and flora, and descriptions of that horrible man-monster, the American Indian. Yet Captain John Smith wrote a book called "The True Relation of Virginia" (1608), enlarged later into "The General History of Virginia," mostly a compilation, vigorously colored with his own personality, and containing the rude germ of the charming legend of Pocahontas. In the second period Robert Berkeley wrote a "History of Virginia," published in London in 1705, less personal, full of observation of plants, animals and Indians, but not free from prejudice. The Virginians were churchmen and royalists, a wealthy, worldly, cheerful, gaming, hunting, and often illiterate set. Still the records of that colony, whether in letter, diary, or book, bear the impress of their surroundings, and were directly valuable in broadening and enriching the English literature of that day. The Puritan colonies were theocracies, the mass of the people being men of the middle class, mechanics and farmers. But their leaders were clergymen, educated at the universities, who, to use the language of Mather, "felt that without a college these regions would have been mere unwatered places for the devil." Harvard College was accordingly founded in 1638, and a printing press set up in Cambridge in 1639, under the oversight of the university authorities. The first English book issued in America was a collection of David's Psalms in metre, called "The Bay Psalm Book," and intended for singing in divine worship, public and private. Ere long new writers employed the press, mostly divines, famous and useful in their own congregations and town and time, whose themes were the vanity of life, impending doom and the immanence of sin; their names form the lists in forgotten catalogues; their books moulder in the dimness of attic libraries, or on the shelves of octaogenarian bibliophiles. A different personality does stand out in this first Puritan period, that of Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, not because of the beauty of her verse, as we judge poetry nowadays, but because of the sweet and powerful influence it exerted during a long life, and by reason of the grief of her disciples, John Norton and John Rogers, who commenced the second colonial period of Puritan literature with graceful and mournful elegies on her death. This second period began in 1676, and ended with the early struggles of the American Revolution. It contains such names as that of Michael Wigglesworth, "the explicit and unshrinking rhymer of the Five Points of Calvinism." The Puritan religion, as developed amid the hardships of the American wilderness, became narrow, intense, and gloomy; and these poems of anguish and of the wrath of God, were read and studied with the Bible and the Shorter Catechism. The Mather family ruled intellectually in New England for three generations, the greatest of the great name being Cotton Mather, who was born in 1663, and died in 1728. He had an enormous memory, enormous industry, and enormous vanity. He was devout in all the minutiae of life: poking the fire, wind ing the clock, putting out the candle, washing his hands, and paring his nails, with appropriate religious texts and meditations. He knew Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and one Indian tongue. He had the largest private library in America. He wrote many books, the names of some being as follows: "Boanerges. A Short Essay to Strengthen the Impressions Produced by Earthquakes;" "The Comforts of One Walking Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death;" "Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion;" "The Peculiar Treasure of the Almighty King Opened," etc. He also compiled the most famous book produced by any American during the colonial time: "Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England, from its first planting in the year 1620 unto the year of Our Lord, 1698." It is a history of the settlement of New England, with lives of its governors, magistrates and divines; a history of Harvard College and the churches; an account of the "Wars of the Lord," narrating the troubles of the New Englanders with "the Devil, Separatists, Familists, Antinomians, Quakers, clerical imposters, and Indians." It is an ill-digested mass of personal reminiscences, social gossip, snatches of conversation, touches of description, traits of character and life, that help us to paint for ourselves some living pictures of early New England. Jonathan Edwards, the most acute and original thinker yet born in America, was graduated at Yale College in 1720, after a marvellous boyhood of intense and rigid intellectual discipline. As a student at college and afterwards as tutor there, his researches and discoveries in science were so great that had he not preferred theology he would have made a distinguished investigator in astronomy and physics. He was the pastor of a church at Northampton until he was dismissed on account of the strictness of his discipline, then missionary to the Indians near Stockbridge, and in 1758 was called to be president of Princeton College. As a man Jonathan Edwards was simple, meek, spiritual, gentle, and disinterested; as a metaphysician he was acute, profound, and remorselessly logical; as a theologian he was the massive champion of John Calvin and all the rigors of his creed. There were many distinguished names in the various colonies during the second period-governors, divines, lawyers.pro |